I think one of the big issues facing us today is:

- Critical speech is a necessary type of speech, but

- Posting critical speech in an online environment like ours (run by algorithms that attempt to foster violence to feed capitalism) is inherently somewhat dangerous.

You can make criticisms in ways less likely to harm the person you are criticizing, although even with caution it is never totally under your control.

But the speaker is in danger as well - for example, if I name a right-wing demagogue, their followers may descend on me.

Social media is currently engineered to put us in contact with whatever will make us most existentially uncomfortable, in an effort to get us to calm ourselves down by shopping. It's like a game with microtransaction bait: bad, good, bad, good, bad, good-but-you-have-to-pay.

Now, on criticism: who is harmed and who benefits *frequently but not always* attaches to the starting advantages of the parties involved. But...

The "better" the algorithms get, from a capitalistic standpoint, the more they reward the class they are trying to lure.

In short, the Twitter algorithm is likely learning (consciously or otherwise) to retain the interest and participation of, SPECIFICALLY, those people who click ads and spend money - which is to say, rich people, who trend abled, white, cis & het.

Twitter tracks the inputs and outputs of situations, tracks what it thinks you like and hate.

It shows you things that make you mad on purpose - that's negative engagement. Sometimes that's a celebrity who was racist, sometimes it's a teenage stalking victim.

The outcome of making you mad on purpose might be that you click out, shop a little, and come back. It might be that you join a dogpile, intentionally or otherwise. It might be that you get sick and tired of this hellsite and quit.

Twitter mainly cares about that first outcome.

They want rich people to get a little mad but not TOO mad. They don't care if the rest of us quit.

Therefore, social media has financial incentives to enact a response to conflict which comforts the comfortable, afflicts the afflicted, and broadens existing inequities.

I spend a lot of time focusing on how to mitigate collateral damage; and I regularly question the ethics of posting critical speech - or indeed just posting - on Twitter at all because of these things.

But I think that if we move off, we have to do it in an organized fashion.

We cannot go one by one.

We should pick our destinations and a date, and share these things widely, then strike simultaneously.

In Tumblr's case, a date was announced from outside, and that did more to get people to leave than any number of us wanting to.

If a guy lights a cigarette in front of a property with a gas leak, and catches on fire, it's mostly the property maintainer's fault, but when we see more and more burn patients needing skin grafts after lighting their cigarettes there, we should really go smoke somewhere else.